The Body of an American

The Body of an American is a name bestowed on an unidentified soldier and a final image of national commemoration. The ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery gives one anonymous body an elaborate public identity, while the surrounding narrative insists that the body could have belonged to any number of ordinary people—and sets that ceremonial honor against the lynching of Wesley Everest after his return from war.

The unidentified body

A concurrent resolution of Congress authorized the Secretary of War to bring to the United States the body of an American Expeditionary Forces member who had died in Europe during the war and whose identity could not be established. At a tarpaper morgue at Châlons-sur-Marne, officials selected one pine box from among many containing the remains of unidentified dead. The passage’s question of how they chose John Doe makes the selection itself part of the story: only one body could be sent for burial, although other boxes held the remains of people no less unknown.

The details resist any clean conversion of remains into a national symbol. The body is associated with a sack of bones, bronze buttons, and puttees; the morgue is marked by chloride of lime and the stench of the year-old dead. The ceremony’s chosen body is therefore not a recovered individual whose name and history can be restored. It stands for the unresolved multitude from which it was selected.

A life made of many lives

The narrative imagines John Doe’s life through birth and work rather than through an identifiable biography. It moves from the blood and pain of birth to scattered occupations: work for an exterminating company in Union City, filling pipes in an opium joint in Trenton, service as a YMCA secretary, work as an express agent, truck driver, and Ford mechanic, and selling books in Denver. These fragments do not establish a single documented life. Their accumulation makes the absent identity feel crowded with possible lives, none of which can be securely attached to the remains in the coffin.

That imaginative multiplicity complicates the official choice of one soldier as the representative dead. The selected body is singular for the purposes of burial, but the lives suggested around it are plural and ordinary. The text keeps the unknown soldier from becoming only a blank emblem by filling the blank with possible work, hardship, and experience—while preserving the fact that none can be confirmed as his.

The ceremony and its honors

The day is presented as too meaningful and tragic for applause. Silence, tears, songs, prayer, muffled drums, and soft music furnish the public response. President Harding describes the tribute as impersonal and says that the name of the man whose body lies before him has gone with his soul. The language honors the dead while acknowledging the absence at the center of the ceremony: the nation can assemble around the body, but it cannot name the person.

The honors become strikingly material. Where the soldier’s chest ought to have been, the text places an array of decorations: the Congressional Medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, the French Médaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, Italian and Romanian medals, the Czechoslovak war cross, and the Polish Virtuti Militari. The display also includes a wreath from Hamilton Fish Jr. and a small wampum gift from an Arizona delegation. Woodrow Wilson brings a bouquet of poppies. These gifts make the anonymous body the recipient of an international and national pageant of honor, even as the missing name and the absent chest remain visible in the account.

Wesley Everest and the limits of public honor

The funeral’s dignified silence stands against the fate of Wesley Everest, whose return from overseas leads not to public recognition but to renewed logging work. His family came from the Kentucky and Tennessee tradition of woodsmen and squirrel hunters who had followed the trail west into the forests of the Pacific slope. In the army he was a sharpshooter and won a medal for marksmanship. After his discharge, however, he returned to his old job as a logger.

When a mob took Everest from jail, the city lights had been turned off. He told men in the other cells to tell his companions that he had done his best. Taken by limousine to the Chehalis River bridge, he was tortured and mutilated before being hanged in the headlights. In his agony he begged his captors to shoot him rather than make him suffer. The coroner at the inquest treated the killing as a joke. Set beside the carefully staged burial of the unknown soldier, Everest’s death exposes a brutal disparity: the nation can honor an unidentified serviceman with prayers, music, medals, and flowers, while a returned veteran is subjected to mob violence and his inquest becomes an occasion for mockery.

The title consequently names both a body and a claim about national belonging. The Arlington ceremony makes one unknown soldier stand for the country’s dead; the surrounding episodes test what that collective language includes and what it fails to protect. Its tribute is moving, but the contrast with Everest prevents commemoration from becoming a complete account of the nation’s treatment of those who served.